 Davies, her co-author on this exciting book. I read it in, I think, two sittings, Warren Ukraine making sense of a senseless conflict. We're going to hear all about that book, what's in it, the questions they answered, questions that we still need to answer in just a little bit. But first, I want to encourage you, if you haven't already done so, to introduce yourself in the chat, say hi, where you're from, any organizations that you are affiliated with or things that you're working on. We're going to start with a few updates and after that, we'll introduce our speakers, Medea and Nicholas. They'll each talk for about, I don't know, five to seven minutes. I forgot something. Before we go to them, we're going to show part of a video that is being used, it's being incorporated into their book tour. It's a fabulous video. It's almost 20 minutes. We're not going to watch all 20 minutes, probably watch about 10 minutes. But we want to give you a flavor for this video because if you host an event, this is a tool, a resource that you can use. And then they'll be there to take questions and conduct a Q&A. If you can't host an event, but you want to use the tool educationally, if you're speaking to a group, you can do that as well. So it's a valuable resource. We'll take a look at that. Then we'll hear from our authors, and we will have a Q&A with them. You can put your questions for them in the chat as you hear them talk. After that, we ask that you stay for our Capitol Calling Party. We will be calling Congress, Capitol Hill, our House representatives, our senators to say, we want you to publicly advocate for a ceasefire. We need to hear your voice saying, ceasefire now. We do not want a protracted war or a nuclear war. We want negotiations, not escalation. More weapons will only up the ante and trigger retaliatory moves. So those are the agenda items for tonight. So glad you're with us. We've got a good crowd, 300 already. Terrific. So with that, let's go to Cole Harrison of Massachusetts Peace Action for an update on defused nuclear war. And Cole, I think you're muted. Okay, let's see. We're having some issues. I'm not sure, Mahakul. Okay, there we go. I got booted out. I had to come back. So yeah, I just wanted to say that we have a defused nuclear war activity coming up. It's the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, not this weekend, but next weekend on the 16th of October. So there's a national mobilization to address that and say that the threat of nuclear war is as serious now as it was in the Cuban Missile Crisis, or it's the most serious that's ever been since 1962. There was a webinar on Sunday that went over a bunch of this, a great video. There will be actions at congressional offices on Friday, the 14th, and there's still time to organize an action at your own congressional office. And we've got six policy points to make and the policy of first use of nuclear weapons, where the U.S. reserves the right to use nuclear weapons first, rejoin nuclear weapons treaties the U.S. pulled out of, take U.S. nuclear weapons off hair trigger alert, get rid of ICBMs, those are the land-based nuclear missiles that are stored mostly up in South Dakota and Montana. Support congressional action to avert nuclear war. Jim McGovern has a resolution in the house with the number of cosponsors. We need to build the momentum behind that and move the money to human needs, not war. I think we've got 30 or 40 actions at congressional offices already scheduled. We have six in Massachusetts. So please go to defuse nuclear war.org to sign up and get involved. And then finally on the 16th, I should have said is the day to go in canvassing communities and outreach in different ways in communities where the 14th is for congressional offices and 16th is for communities. Excellent. And if you can summarize a little bit of that and put it in the chat, that would be wonderful. We want to remind friends and allies, people who may not agree with us on a lot of issues that the Cuban Missile Crisis, I remember it when I was about 10 and we were stocking up on food. We thought we were going to somehow survive this. This was averted not by bombing anyone, not by engaging in a hot war. It was averted because the United States under JFK offered to remove nuclear missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviet Union, removing those missiles from Cuba pointed at Florida. Thank you, Cole. Now we're going to go to Brian Garvey, also with Massachusetts Peace Action for an update on Yemen. Thanks, Marcy. Yemen, it's another area of the world where we desperately need negotiations to end a conflict. The war in Yemen being prosecuted with the help of the United States and led by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and its allies is now in its eighth year. For the past six months, there has been a fragile truce that has stopped much of the conflict. But unfortunately, just in the past few days, that truce timed out and we were hoping that it would be extended. But unfortunately, and both parties are being blamed for this, the truce was not extended. Now we have not yet seen an uptick in violence again or a resumption of the bombing campaign. But it's an incredibly tense situation in Yemen right now. Fortunately, due to the efforts of activists all across the country, including folks at Code Pink and Peace Action, there is a war powers resolution that is in Congress right now, both in the House and the Senate. And this is useful because it can be used as leverage. If the bombing does resume, it can be brought up in the Senate privilege. It'll go to the top of the agenda. And this would actually threaten to remove U.S. support and effectively ground the Saudi Arabian Air Force by denying it logistical parts. So we'd have to be ever ready. We need to keep a very close eye on the situation in Yemen. And if there is a resumption in violence, we all need to be ready to mobilize quickly to support a war powers resolution and to bring this issue to the floor and really end the conflict and our role in it as quickly as possible. So this is incredibly important and something for us all to keep our eye on. Thanks. Yeah, something that's under the radar with the attention focused on Ukraine. Naturally, Yemen has receded into the background, but we need to keep the pressure on. Thank you so much for that update, Brian Garvey of Massachusetts Peace Action. Before we show you clips of the video, Maha is going to take us to the Code Pink webpage where we are promoting the book tour so you can see what resources are available, the schedule and how you can plug in some. Maha, if you're able to share the screen, we'll take a look at that. There we go. So and if you have an issue finding this, you can always just Google or site search media management, Nicholas Davis, Davies, Ukraine, New Book and Speaking Tour, just book tour media and you'll probably find it here. So let's scroll down, take a look at what we've got. Okay, you want to buy the book? This is where you can buy the book and you can we're going to give you a link in the chat, which makes it really easy to buy the book. I believe it is code pink dot org backslash Ukraine book tour code pink dot org backslash Ukraine book tour. A lot of people like to order it online and that's how you can do it through Code Pink. Let's keep going. We'll scroll down, see what else we've got. Book reviews, we'd like you to post a book review. I'm sure you're going to like this book, it's great. Videos and articles, we're going to take a look at a video in a minute. Fliers for the events and we've got a lot of events planned and Medea and Nicholas will tell us how it's going on the on the tour so far. Sample press releases. If you're hosting a book tour event and you want to let the press know, we've got the sample press release. Great. Let's take a look at what what's already planned in terms of the events. Okay, let's go slowly here. We've got, where is this? New Hampshire, Massachusetts. I know Massachusetts Peace Action has been very busy. Keep going, Northeastern University, Boston, Boston. Okay. Arlington, Virginia. Nope, Arlington, right? I'm sorry. Arlington, Mass. Oh, Arlington, I'm sorry. Detroit, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Chicago, Illinois, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, SJSU, Student Union Theater. Okay. So quite a few events planned. More are in the works. And it's, there's plenty of time for you to also volunteer to host an event. Maha, are we able to put up the tentative schedule by region where she'll be? Where she and Nicholas will be? There we go. Tentative schedule. So you can take a picture of this with your phone if you want. Or you can ask me for it later, and I'll send it to you. It's marcie at codepink.org. M-A-R-C-Y. But just to go over it, you know, October, we're in Massachusetts, D.C., Columbus, Ohio, New York City, upstate New York, then into November, Maryland, Portland, Oregon, also in the latter part of November, Northern California, Houston, Texas, back to California for Southern California. And in 2023, we expect tour stops in Florida and the Southern United States. There you have it. So that's plenty of information, I'm sure, for you to digest and think about in terms of hosting a book tour. It could be at a church. It could be at a union hall. It could be at a university. Wherever you're thinking, you can get a pretty good crowd. Okay? Thank you so much, Maha, for sharing the screen. Now we're going to take a look at the video that has also shown at each book tour event. We're not going to watch the whole video. It's almost 20 minutes, but we will watch a good 10 minutes, and then we'll hear from our authors. So here we go. And we have 400 people. Yeah, 401. I'm not sure if we're supposed to hear anything. Here we go. Let's talk about the heartbreaking war in Ukraine and what we could do to try to end it. Every day the war rages on, civilians and soldiers are being killed. Millions of Ukrainians have been forced to flee and seek asylum in foreign lands. Schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, and infrastructure have been reduced to rubble. We wrote this book to try to help people make sense of a war that should never have happened, a war that has raged on for months and might well rage on for years, a war that could lead to a nuclear confrontation, a war that must be stopped. We know that people have very different opinions about this conflict, and we hope that our book and this talk will foster respectful dialogue. We have not tried to justify or excuse Russia's invasion of Ukraine because we do not think it is justifiable or excusable. We hope we can help you understand the context, the background, and the actions of all the parties that led to this crisis. As U.S. citizens, we have very little hope of influencing the Russian government, but we should be able to influence our own government, which is why it's so important to look at the role the United States has played in fomenting the conflict. Let's look at two elements of U.S. involvement that we highlight in our book, NATO Expansion and the events of 2014. Western leaders call NATO a defensive military alliance, but NATO was formed to defend Western Europe from invasion by the Soviet Union. That mission was accomplished when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. NATO should have been dissolved at the end of the Cold War, along with the Warsaw Pact, which was NATO's counterpart in the Eastern Bloc. Instead, NATO reinvented itself to justify its continued existence. It expanded all the way to Russia's borders, despite many promises that it would not do so, and ignoring warnings from experienced U.S. and Western diplomats that this would lead to a predictable yet entirely avoidable crisis with Russia as, in fact, it has. You can see the map showing the various waves of expansion in which NATO incorporated former Soviet republics and Russia's European neighbors. In 2018, the antagonism reached new heights when NATO, under U.S. pressure, publicly promised membership to the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia. While no definite date was set, NATO began supplying increased levels of military aid and training to Ukraine, including Ukraine in military exercises. So Russia certainly had legitimate concerns about Ukraine's involvement in an ever-expanding military alliance that was encircling Russia with powerful military forces and had already unleashed aggressive wars and occupations in Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, and Libya and Syria in 2011. The other event that served to set the stage for the Russian invasion in 2022 was the coup in Ukraine in 2014. The 2014 upheavals began with massive peaceful protests against the corrupt pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Unfortunately, though, these protests turned violent and were co-opted by neo-Nazi groups that refused to go along with an internationally negotiated plan for a political transition, and instead, they spearheaded a coup. The extent of U.S. support and involvement in this coup is still shrouded in secrecy, as are previous U.S.-backed coups in Iran, Chile, and many other countries. But a leaked audio tape of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Newland and U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Piat exposed their roles as coup managers, as they handpicked what positions each of their Ukrainian collaborators would assume in the post-coup government. Although the original peaceful protests in Ukraine were about wanting to join the European Union, Newland dismissed the European Union's more popular choice for Prime Minister Vitaly Klitschko with her infamous F the EU remark. According to a Gallup poll conducted in April 2014, nearly 50% of Ukrainians rejected the legitimacy of the post-coup government. This led to rebellions in parts of Ukraine that were ethnically and culturally close to Russia. In Crimea, a peninsula on the Black Sea with a mostly Russian-speaking population that was part of Russia from 1783 until 1954, as well as in the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk. In Odessa, 42 anti-coup protesters were burned to death by a mob on May 2nd, 2014. The new government in Ukraine was rejected by the parliament in Crimea, and a referendum to rejoin Russia passed overwhelmingly and was accepted by Russia but not recognized by other countries. The provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk also passed referendums declaring themselves independent from Ukraine, leading to a civil war that killed an estimated 14,000 people. Many Ukrainian military units based in this region defected to the self-declared people's republics or refused to fight their own people, so the Ukrainian government formed new National Guard units to fight the separatists. These included units like the Assov Battalion, recruited from the same neo-Nazi groups that took up arms to spearhead the coup in Kiev in February 2014. The worst fighting of the civil war ended in February 2015 with the signing of the Minsk-2 Accord. This was drafted by France, Germany and Russia, and agreed to by Ukraine and the self-declared republics. It set up a ceasefire in a buffer zone between the warring parties and was monitored by 1,300 monitors and staff from the OSCE, which is the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. While the ceasefire largely held from 2015 to 2022, the Ukrainian government failed to implement the political aspects of the Minsk-2 Agreement. It had agreed to grant Donetsk and Luhans a new autonomous status, but each time the Ukrainian government tried to move forward on this, extreme right-wing forces re-exerted their power and insisted that Ukraine must instead keep fighting to recover its lost territories. NATO and the US also bear responsibility for the failure of Minsk-2. Despite officially claiming to support the agreement, NATO and the US, under both Trump and Biden, kept building up Ukraine's military, encouraging the Ukrainian government to believe it could eventually recover Daumbas and Crimea by force, and that the US and NATO would support that. As tensions were reaching a boiling point in December 2021, Russia took the initiative of drafting two mutual security treaties, one between Russia and the United States and the other between Russia and NATO. These were not take it or leave it demands, but drafts for negotiation. Unfortunately, the United States and NATO summarily dismissed Russia's proposals. By building up Ukraine's military, promising Ukraine NATO membership, and dismissing negotiations, the US and its allies turn Ukraine into a dangerous weapon in their revived Cold War against Russia. Then, in the days leading up to February's Russia invasion, the OSCE ceasefire monitors documented thousands of explosions around the ceasefire line in Daumbas, mostly on the Donetsk and Luhant side, indicating a major escalation of artillery fire by Ukrainian government forces. So even in the immediate causes of the war, it is deceptive to describe the invasion as unprovoked, as Biden and US officials routinely do. By early 2022, Russia had amassed large military forces near Belarus's border and its own borders with Ukraine. All right, there you go. So that's the book tour video that is shown at the book tour events following the showing. Medea and Nicholas speak to the audience. Fabulous video, and we can all use it as an educational tool. Again, if you want to buy the book, and I think you will, after you listen to our authors, just go to codepink.org, backslash Ukraine book tour, and I'll put that in the chat. So now let's go to our authors. I'm going to introduce Medea Benjamin, a woman I know well. She's my co-host on codepink Congress. I'm so honored to have Medea as a co-host and a friend. She is the co-founder of the Women's Lead Peace Group, Codepink, author of 10 books, and co-author of the forthcoming book, War on Ukraine, Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict. She's also co-founder of the Human Rights Group, Global Exchange, the Peace in Ukraine Coalition, Unfreeze Afghanistan, which advocates for returning the $7 billion of Afghan funds frozen in U.S. banks. A survey, The Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect, and the Nobel Peace Prize for Cuban Doctors Campaign. Welcome, Medea Benjamin. Hey, so nice to be on with you, and it's so exciting that we have over 400 people on here. And I think it speaks to the fact that people are really thirsty to be involved, to be engaged, to learn more, to discuss with each other. I see we already have a number of different opinions going on in the chat, which is fine. I do think, as we say every time we have a Congress, that this is about respectful discussion. And I'm finding that's what's happening on the book tour so far, that people come with preconceived notions of what I'm going to say. In fact, there was a college today that said they got someone saying, don't bring that pro-Putin apologist to your university. And this woman invited the person, and we engaged in a very, very constructive discussion. I think that one of the key issues that people ask about is the issue of can we engage with Putin? Will Putin actually negotiate? And this is something that I think we all need the tools to speak about. And there are many ways to approach that. One is to say we don't know, but let's try. Another is to say that there were these negotiations in late March and early April that was mediated by Turkey, where it looked like Russia and Ukraine were moving ahead on a series of 15 points, and that it was the US and the UK that squashed those negotiations. It's also important to point out that there have been talks with Russia, successful ones, on very specific issues. The issue of brains not getting out of Ukraine that were so important for feeding countries all over Africa and the Middle East is something that was negotiated and a solution that is not a perfect one, but at least it's getting many, many, many tons of brains out of Ukraine is an example of a mediated talk. Another is about the Zaporizhia nuclear plant where there was and still is extreme danger of both sides accusing the other of shelling the plant and negotiations that ended up having the International Atomic Energy Agency go into that plant is another example. A third example is the prisoner swaps that have been negotiated. And there have been, as far as I know, about 16 of them. And you can imagine the difficulty of a prisoner swap, the level of trust that has to be created in order for that to be successfully done. And that has happened many times. So it doesn't mean that any of the sides are ready to sit down to serious negotiations about what's going to happen in Dunbass, but it does mean that they can talk to each other. The question for us is really, we don't have an influence on Putin, but we're supposed to have an influence on our own government. And is our government ready to call for negotiations? Is our government ready to have Biden talk to Putin or to have Lavrov and Blinken talk to each other? And is our government ready to push the Ukrainians now to negotiate, which they were, at one point, extremely ready to do and had even given up on the hope of joining NATO and now went into a fast-track position on NATO and have been saying publicly in the last few days that they will not negotiate. So we have to be pushing our own government. And I think that's where we as a very weak peace movement have not been able to put the kind of pressure on the White House and not put the kind of pressure on the Congress. And that's something that is important for us to figure out how we're going to build this movement that's capable of that when even the progressives in Congress have a hard time signing onto a very, very mild letter initiated by the head of the Progressive Caucus, Pramila Jayapal, that doesn't even talk about ending the transfer of weapons, but just says we should be seriously entering into negotiations and she can't get that Progressive Caucus to sign on to that. And in the meanwhile, there are people on the right and sometimes the extreme right who aren't taking up this issue. Trump himself has said, if I were president, this would not be happening. We need talks that will end this conflict because it's affecting the whole world. Maybe Trump should be the one to lead this, he suggests. We hear Tucker Carlson on Fox News and other anchors on Fox News who are now calling for saying, is this the defense of Ukraine worth risking nuclear Armageddon? Things that we wish we were hearing on other stations as well as from our elected officials. And so I think it's so critical that we don't allow the right to take up this issue, mainly as an issue to show their opposition to Biden, but we make this a progressive issue. So that's why I'm so glad we're here tonight, that we're talking, that we'll get a chance to discuss these issues and I want to pass it over to whoever's going to introduce my wonderful colleague in the writing of this book, Nicholas Davis. We can hear you, Marcy. Thank you, Medea. Before we go to Nicholas, I just want to remind people to please be respectful in the chat. It looks like we're being fairly respectful. I know there's a lot of disagreement. It's not just on the left. It's on the left, on the right and in between. And so it's critical that we have these conversations. I do want to invite those of you who believe that it's imperative we call for a ceasefire, negotiation, not escalation, investments in climate and housing and healthcare, not endless war, not weapons that will only prolong the misery and up the ante. If you're in agreement with that, please do join our peace and Ukraine Coalition. We meet every other Wednesday. We're meeting tomorrow. And I put in the chat, and I'll put in the chat again, the link to join our coalition. All right, Cole, let's go to our next author. You're doing the introduction. Sure. So our next speaker is Nicholas J.S. Davies. He is an independent journalist, researcher with Code Pink, and co-author of War in Ukraine, Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict. And he's also the author of Blood in our Hands, the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. And he's been a peace activist for more than 50 years. Nicholas. Well, yeah. I'm honored to be here speaking to all of you. And this has been an incredible experience writing this with Medeo. We've been writing together for several years. And the publisher asked us to write this book and gave us only a couple of months to get it done. And, you know, now Medeo's already on tour talking about it. And what's been striking me the last couple of weeks is that, you know, we have a chapter that Alice Slater helped us with, too, from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. We have a chapter on the danger of nuclear war. And it is here we are after, what is it now, seven, eight months. And that is already getting extremely serious. I caught one of the NPR news summaries a couple of hours ago. And they were talking about it in, you know, their five-minute roundup of the News of the World. And they introduced a so-called expert from Harvard University who was trying to reassure the public in saying that he thought the chances of Russia using nuclear weapons in Ukraine were only 10 to 20 percent. I mean, that is where we are after seven months of this war that we now have, you know, and I mean, who knows where he pulled that number out of? You know, he gave no explanation of that at all. And, you know, Medeo and I wrote an article last week about the UN General Assembly. And we really, we went through every transcript and every speech. And I can tell you that the United States and the West and NATO are not supported by most of the world. 66 countries stood up in the General Assembly and called for peace in Ukraine. So as we describe in the book, the were negotiations for peace. In the first month of the war, within six weeks of the outbreak of war, as Medeo said, there was a 15-point peace plan. And on April the 9th, Boris Johnson went to Kiev. He was the British Prime Minister, who's now resigned in a series of completely stupid scandals. And but he he'd done his damage. And he went to Kiev and he told President Zelensky that the United Kingdom would not be party to any agreement between Ukraine and Russia. That Ukraine should stop talking to Putin and keep fighting him. This is all reported by close advisors to Zelensky in the Ukrainian media. I said that. And he claimed to be speaking on behalf of, quote, the collective West, even though within weeks, Germany, France and Italy all called again for talks. But really by then it was too late. Secretary Austin also went to Kiev a week or two after Johnson. And that's when he famously said that the purpose of the war now was to weaken Russia. Now that brings us around again to nuclear weapons. Because Russia very explicitly has a doctrine that says if they mainly they will only use nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack by another country. But if the if the they will also use nuclear weapons to when the very quote, the very existence of the state is put under threat. And and of course that is a judgment call, isn't it? For them, it's not it's not, you know, when a specific thing happens. And and of course, US US policy on the use of nuclear weapons is even vaguer. The US policy is to quote, you know, use nuclear weapons to quote, defend the vital interests of our allies and partners. I mean, and then it actually gives some examples of what that could how that what that could mean. But then says, but it's not limited to those examples. So in other words, the US policy on nuclear weapons use is even more open-ended than Russia's. And as we point out in the book, the fact that the 12 to 1 imbalance between US military spending and Russian military spending means that in conventional terms, the US has huge military superiority, which means that in a crisis, Russia is far more reliant on its nuclear weapons than than the US would be in a in a similar situation. And both CID Director William Burns and DIA Director Defense Intelligence Agency Director General Scott Berrier both testified to Congress a couple of months ago that let's see, how did they put it? The danger of nuclear war cannot be taken lightly. So and at the UN General Assembly, 66 countries spoke out about this, and many of them cited the danger of nuclear war as the most pressing reason why the war must end now. Many of them pointed out that all wars end the negotiating table. The the Amir of Qatar made that point and and said that, you know, whether it ends now or it ends years from now, it will end at the negotiating table. And, you know, the only and he said the only thing, you know, that is gained by refusing talks now is that thousands more Ukrainians are going to be killed. And and of course we say the same thing in the book. Nicholas, we're going to go to questions. Yeah, sure. Some of the questions that are circulating in the chat or concerns, you know, when people talk about it's not, you know, we can't give in to somebody who's holding the sort of damocles over our head with this nuclear threat or even a veiled nuclear threat. My response is the United States is the one that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki annihilating 200,000 people and estimated we are the ones along with the Soviet Union at the time and now Russia escalating the arms race with new nuclear weapons. This is an implicit threat. So the only answer is to abolish nuclear weapons. Otherwise, anyone, anyone who's in charge of any country that has a nuclear arsenal could issue these kinds of threats so that I don't see the answer as we can't give in to him. I see the answer is we have to abolish nuclear weapons and sign on to the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons which NATO opposes. Okay. So I have a question and then maybe Cole can ask a question and we'll take a look at the chat. My question is about the Minsk Peace Accord. Why did it succeed in part and why did it fail? Yes, well, it succeeded in part because both sides did cooperate with the ceasefire and the buffer zone. I mean, fighting went on for a little while after the signing of the peace accord, but over the months following the signing of the accord, both sides did pull back heavy weapons from the buffer zone as they were required to do and the OSCE with 1300 monitors and staff in Ukraine really did an amazing job of monitoring the ceasefire and they were not there to take sides. They were simply there to keep track of if there were violations of the ceasefire, they reported on them and they tried to mediate. So in fact, if you look at the casualty figures from that point on, the casualty figures declined and declined and declined to the point where the last couple of years up to 2020 and 2021, more people were killed by unexploded ordinance that exploded and landmines planted back in 24 and 2015 than were killed by active fire. So I mean, so that part of the agreement was working, but the conflict was not resolved because like the conflict today and like every conflict, it required a political solution and Minsk too included a political solution, a political road map that was supposed to be followed and that involved in order to keep Donetsk and Luhansk inside Ukraine. The agreement was that the Ukrainian parliament would grant them a new status as autonomous regions within Ukraine, give them a much greater degree of self-government and which effectively would have allowed them to maintain the links that many of them wanted with Russia and also for there to be elections held in those regions. But each time, first President Poroshenko who was elected after the coup and then President Zelensky who ran as a peace candidate in 2019 and promised to end the Civil War, both of them when they tried to move forward the, you know, these neo-Nazi groups now integrated into the Ukrainian military, flexed their muscle, held demonstrations, put up roadblocks, literally roadblocks to prevent troops being pulled back from the front line and so at each point, first Poroshenko and then Zelensky gave in to them. Poroshenko is on record having said that he only agreed to the Minsk agreement to buy time, but he did try to, the parliament actually passed an autonomy bill on its first reading, but the neo-Nazi groups organized demonstrations through the streets outside, the turn violent, one national guard was killed and hundreds of people were injured and dozens were arrested and so on and so it never got any further at that point. So, you know, then Poroshenko just refused to talk to the people in Donbas and started calling them terrorists and then Zelensky came in, promising peace, but then went through exactly the same process when he encountered opposition from the neo-Nazi groups, including within the military. He backed off, I mean, the leader, the former leader of right sector, who was by then the leader of militia fighting the war, issued a threat that Zelensky would be hung from a tree in the main street of Kiev if he went ahead and followed through on the Minsk agreement. So that was the end of Zelensky's peace efforts. He too ended up refusing to talk to the Donbas leaders. I just thank you so much, Nicholas. You've given us a lot of important background to better understand what happened with the Minsk Accord. Medea, do you think that the shipments of U.S. weapons undermined this accord? Well, certainly, starting in 2015, the U.S. began these shipment of weapons and began training Ukrainians, 20,000 of them a year began, including Ukraine in these military exercises. It's interesting to see Zelensky when he submitted his fast-track application to NATO said we are the de facto a member of NATO, and that is very true because of the incredibly close collaboration between the militaries of NATO. You know, part of NATO becoming a member of NATO is to have compatibility in the military sphere, and that has been happening for the last several years. So I think the U.S. role in militarizing Ukraine has been a disincentive to making the Minsk agreements work. And when we look at the contours of what can be negotiated now, one element of that is to look back at that negotiation and see what in it could be salvaged in a new piece of negotiation. Thank you. Cole, you have a question? Well, I'm going to try to channel some stuff that's in the chat. Several people in the chat are asking you, Medea, how does your position differ from President Putin's position? Some are saying you have, there's no daylight between you and Putin. Where is the daylight? How would you critique Putin's position? And another side of it is some of them are saying that you are disrespectful to Ukrainians or Ukrainian socialists. And how do you answer that? I am horrified by the invasion. I think it is a not only illegal, it is immoral. I believe that there are terrible war crimes that Russia is committing and my heart goes out to the Ukrainian people. I learned in this process that my grandmother was from Ukraine, that I have family in Ukraine. I am against war in general and I'm against this war. And I think Putin is criminal for having launched this war. If I were a Russian, I would be protesting. I would probably be in jail right now. I just wrote a piece with the former co-director of Code Pink, Ariel Gold, who is now the head of Fellowship of Reconciliation, about how we have to support the conscientious objectors, those who refuse to fight. And so I am offended when people call me a Putin apologist. I think it is an easy response that people have. Perhaps a knee jerk one, perhaps that is taken from the propagandistic views of most of the mainstream media. But I think we need to be smarter than that. We need to be more profound than that. We need to recognize that while we might have differences in what emphasis we put on different elements of the history leading up to this, if we want to see a continuation of this world and not a nuclear apocalypse, and we can go into other areas such as increased hunger throughout Africa and parts of the Middle East, we can also talk about the environmental horrific consequences of this war and many different dimensions of it, then we have to come together and say this is a war that Putin should never have waged, that the Ukrainian people are the victims of this war, and how are we going to end it? And I don't think that an endless stream of weapons that support the military merchants of death in the United States and make their stock soar is the way that this war is going to end. Thank you. Very strong statement. We're coming up on the hour and we want to have time for our action. So let's unmute and thank Nicholas and Medea for being with us tonight, for their book, for their book tour, and for providing a forum and a platform for this kind of conversation, a very rich conversation. So Mahav, if you can unmute everyone, they can thank our guests. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you, Nicholas. Thank you so much. Our champions for peace. I'm going to put in the chat one more time. Thank you very much. Order the book tonight and share it with friends. I'm putting the link right here in the chat. Online you can order the book. Now we're going to go to our Capitol calling party and then we're going to go back and look at how to plug into this book tour. So Brian Garvey of Massachusetts Peace Action, he's going to lead us in the next portion of the Capitol calling party. Thanks, Marcy, and thanks Medea and thanks Nicholas for those great, great presentations. I don't want to speak for Nicholas and Medea about why they wrote this book, but I suspect, heavily suspect that one of the reasons was to inspire activists to take action in opposing the continuation of this war in Ukraine. So now it's time for us to do that. Yes, you got a little fuzzy, but we didn't completely lose you. Keep going. Okay, you can still hear me. So given what you just heard, it's now time to take that information and put it into action. So I'm going to put in the chat the phone number for calling Congress. This is the congressional switchboard. It said 202-224-3121 and you call that number and you ask to be connected to your members of Congress, to your representative and to your senators. And what we want, what we want you to say to your representatives is to loudly support an end to this war right now, because that is the best thing that can happen to Ukrainian people, the best thing that can happen for the American people. It's the best thing that can happen for the people of the world. Like Maria just said, you know, this is a fact of food crisis Brian, I'm not sure what's happening, but we're losing you. I think that might be somebody else who's not in the background, but I'll try and be even louder. Sometimes you got to be loud if you want to end a war like this. So like I said, that number is easy to call and it makes a difference. You know, these are politicians. So when they hear from people, they think to themselves, oh, wow, I should really consider that or I might lose some votes. Jeff asks if we're supposed to leave voicemails. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's 8.55 p.m. in Washington, D.C. They may not be picking up their phones. So do leave a message. I'm going to do so myself right now. Yeah, I'm doing it right now too. And I think Maha's going to put some music on. We're going to take five minutes. Leave a message. We've got some talking points in the chat. Thank you. So once Marcy gets off the phone, it looks like she's actually talking to somebody. That's pretty impressive. Yeah. I just want to thank everyone. Okay. I'm off. I really appreciate it. Say my peace. Yeah, thank you to all who stay to make those phone calls vitally important. Please, well, if you're not on Code Pink Congress's listserv to Google Group, it's basically a bulletin board I send out. Reminder is about our Zooms. Please do let us know. You can just email Maha at codepink.org if you want to join the Google group, or if you'd like to be a Code Pink Congress liaison, a point person, we want as many point people as possible in each congressional district. So that's a really important role to play. With that, I also want to remind you that we have a piece in Ukraine coalition. Somebody I think was Jerry posted in the chat. Why don't all the peace groups get together, work together and not in silos. And we often do co-sponsor events with each other. And we are working on creating a larger coalition right now. We have this coalition, as I mentioned, peace in Ukraine. You can join if you want to join it. Just let me know. You can email me, marcia at codepink.org. Yes, I want to join the peace and Ukraine coalition. I support a ceasefire now. I support negotiations for peace. I support an end to these billions of dollars worth of weapons that we're sending over there that will only fuel the war. I mean, why would somebody think that there wouldn't be retaliation and it wouldn't up the ante? Of course it will. I even see now the New Yorker. And now I'm on a rant. The New Yorker just published a piece about how we're already in World War III. So we might as well give it all we've got. And I saw that picked up by, I think it was in the LA Times too. So these are the messages that the corporate media are sending to us. It's not the path toward peace. And we have to push back really, really strongly. So let me know if you want to join the peace and Ukraine coalition. We're meeting tomorrow. 130 Pacific time, 430 Eastern. And with that, I want to thank you. Before we close, I just want to announce the next Code Pink Congress event is in two weeks on the Taiwan Policy Act. That will be October 18th, same time, same station. And I want to make one more plug for the book tour. If you want to invite me or Nicholas to your community, I'm finding just in the few that we've had so far, it's a great way to bring people together to talk about their local organizing. So invite us, use us, and it will be helpful for all of those who feel very lonely out there in your community. It's a way to really bring us together. You can email maHA at codepink.org. Absolutely. Thank you for making that point, because we do hear from people who say, you know, I'm out here. I don't know who else will join the picket line with me. I would like to organize. So this is a great vehicle, this book tour. It's a great vehicle for educating and mobilizing, organizing all of that. How do you get involved? You go to codepink.org, backslash, Ukraine, book tour, and all the information is right there. I want to thank maHA, maHA Khan, who has navigated the tech for us tonight, and does so much work on the book tour and on Code Pink Congress. And I want to thank my co-host, Cole Harrison and Brian Garby, of course, our fabulous guests, Medea Benjamin, my co-host, and Nicholas J.S. Davies. And with that, I say good night. Go forward, organize. Activists become organizers, and thank you all. Good night, everyone. Do you want to say the chat? Just go down to the bottom. There are three dots. Click save chat. Thank you, guys. Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much for keeping up.